Billionaire Greene sells historic Palm Beach post office building to Breakers affiliate

Billionaire Jeff Greene has sold the landmarked Palm Beach Main Post Office Building to a company affiliated with The Breakers resort next door. The price of the off-market sale was recorded at $28 million via a deed posted Dec. 26 by the Palm Beach County Clerk’s office.

Town resident Greene had owned the Mediterranean-style building at 95 N. County Road through one of his companies, which paid $3.725 million for it in 2011. After buying it, Greene kept intact the exterior and the lobby area, with its historic murals, and used the rest of the 1936 building as office space for his energy-and-fuel company and his real-estate-investment business.

The purchase further expands The Breakers’ real estate portfolio in the Royal Poinciana Way commercial district. The latest deal brings to eight the number of real estate purchases the resort and its affiliates have executed since 2010 in the area.

The other purchases included nearly all of the buildings on the north side of Royal Poinciana Way between Bradley Place and North County Road. In addition to running immediately south of the historic post office building, The Breakers’ golf course occupies land on the south side of Royal Poinciana Way, the town’s historic Main Street.

The Breakers-related transactions on the street have tallied at more than $100 million, courthouse records show. But that total does not include the money that changed hands in a massive September transaction that involved multiple commercial buildings. In that private deal, the buildings were sold at the east end of Royal Poinciana Way and adjacent Sunset Avenue, with some abutting North County Road. Because of the way that sale was structured, no price for the transaction was ever recorded at the Palm Beach County Courthouse.

Greene sold the old post office building through a California-registered limited partnership named Little Broad Beach Partners LP, the deed shows.

Messages left for Greene and representatives of The Breakers about the sale were not immediately returned Dec. 26. It’s unclear how the new owner plans to use the old post office building, which cannot be demolished because of its historic status. The town granted the building landmark protection in 2009.

About a block from the ocean, the building looks straight down Royal Poinciana Way’s landscaped median to the Flagler Memorial Bridge. On a half-acre lot, the building has 13,932 square feet of space, inside and out, property records show.

When Greene bought the building from the U.S. Postal Service, a post office was still operating there. It closed several months later and moved nearby to Royal Poinciana Plaza, where it operates as one of two post offices in Palm Beach.

Under the terms of the 2011 sale, Greene was required to keep the old post office building’s grand lobby intact, in accordance with preservation covenants attached to the deed. Those covenants were related to the building’s inclusion in the National Register of Historic Places.

The covenants listed “architecturally and/or historically significant exterior and interior features” that included the set of three murals depicting a Seminole village painted in the late 1930s by artist Charles Rosen and installed on the lobby’s east wall.

The list of protected features also mentioned the two-story “space and volume of the public lobby,” the post office boxes on the lobby’s north and east walls, bronze and wood grilles covering the lobby’s second-story windows and the lobby’s two marble pedestal desks and tile floor.

When The Breakers-affiliated company bought the buildings nearby in September, a statement was issued on behalf of Paul Leone, president and CEO of Flagler System Inc., the parent company of Flagler System Management and The Breakers Palm Beach Inc. The September purchase aligned “with The Breakers’ ongoing initiative to preserve and revitalize Palm Beach’s historic Main Street and surrounding neighborhood,” the statement said, noting that the buildings are within walking distance of the resort.

The Breakers’ parent company’s holdings on Royal Poinciana Way include the ground floor and underground parking garage at Via Flagler by The Breakers, a mixed-use development where the resort leases space to tenants and operates Henry’s Palm Beach restaurant. The Breakers’ company bought the property there from Frisbie Group, the project’s developer, in a $20-million deal struck at the tail end of 2018. Frisbie Group also was the seller of the nearby buildings that changed hands in September.

The Breakers and its affiliated companies are privately owned by the North Carolina-based Kenan family, which is directly related to Mary Lily Kenan Flagler Bingham, the widow of railroad-and-hotel tycoon Henry Flagler. In the late 19th century, Flagler transformed Palm Beach into the country’s premier winter resort town for the society set of the so-called Gilded Age.

Since 2009, Greene has owned a landmarked oceanfront mansion, La Billucia, were he and his wife, Mei Sze, and their family live on South Ocean Boulevard near President-elect Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club. He also owns the Tideline Palm Beach Resort and Spa at 2848 S. Ocean Blvd. on the South End of town.

Forbes estimates Greene’s fortune at $7.9 billion.

For several years, Greene has been building an office, condominium and hotel complex with two towers on the north end of downtown West Palm Beach.

In 2010, Greene ran for the U.S. Senate but lost in the Democratic primary for the seat, which was eventually won by Republican Marco Rubio.

Greene lived in Palm Beach as a teenager and once worked in a service job at The Breakers. He told the Palm Beach Daily News in 2011 that he had a sentimental attachment to the post office building. He regularly picked up mail from P.O. Box 227 for his father, the late Marshall Greene, after the family moved to a small apartment on Sunset Avenue before relocating to West Palm Beach, Greene said at the time.

“I’ve known that building since I was a little kid, and I didn’t want anything bad to happen to it,” Greene said, explaining why he had bought the property. “What a marvelous building.”

This is a developing story. Check back for any updates.

dhofheinz@pbdailynews.com

Darrell Hofheinz is a USA TODAY Network of Florida journalist who writes about Palm Beach real estate in his weekly “Beyond the Hedges” column. He welcomes tips about real estate news on the island. Email dhofheinz@pbdailynews.com, call 561-820-3831 or tweet @PBDN_Hofheinz. Help support our journalism. Subscribe today.

This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Daily News: Resort company pays $28M for historic Palm Beach post office building

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